A Different Game for Trump, and He Doesn’t Get It
Should we take Donald Trump at his word (always a dangerous practice) that he would like to renegotiate the Paris Climate Agreement on terms more favorable to the U.S.—or is he just knowingly making an empty offer to cover his intransigence with a pretense of flexibility?
Sanity would plead the latter—no matter how transparent the pretense, he can say to his base in 2020, “Look, I offered to negotiate but the liberals are still whining. The failed deal is on their heads.”
But let’s just suppose that President Trump has some illusion that he can actually get a new “deal” from 197 other countries. What does that tell us about the world of carnival mirrors he inhabits?
It tells us he has little understanding of how you get things done on the global stage, where multilateral agreements, formal or not, governmental or private, are the glue that holds the world economy together.
The “Transactional” Approach Fails at a National and International Scale
We’ve heard countless times about how Trump is “transactional“—by which the evidence says he likes to go one-on-one with another person or party. This is based on his business experience in real estate, in which bilateralism is the rule, where bamboozling or intimidation have served him well—if not really well, but well enough to keep alive the illusion that he is a great business success.
But bamboozling and intimidation can only go so far when the whole world is watching, and an entire nation is counting on you to make wise decisions. The consequences of an entire country making a gamble are quite a bit different in scale from the kind of gamble you make in business, where if your long shot fizzles you can protect yourself with bankruptcy—which Trump has done on at least three occasions. You can stiff your subcontractors to keep yourself solvent—which Trump has also been fond of doing.
I believe Donald Trump misses the point that in business you are protected by the umbrellas of local, state, and national governments, whereas when you are ARE the government at the highest level, you are fully exposed. You have become not the protected but the protector, and for all his bluster about how much he wants to save the U.S. from depredation by foreign governments, Donald Trump has not much of a clue in that role.
It is no accident that the most successful businessman in the Trump cabinet (Rex Tillerson) was the one urging him to stay in the Climate Agreement. Tillerson has actually had a lot of experience dealing with foreign governments, and he knows when defiance is foolish.
We can also hear the echoes of what Michael Bloomberg and Mitt Romney opined during the Trump campaign—that the guy is a fraud whose business practices are diseased at the root, and he has little capability of running an entire country. It’s unfortunate that Romney changed his tune on Trump when he thought he had a shot at Secretary of State, but even someone as smart as Romney can get bamboozled by a “transactional” type who has long enjoyed misleading people and dashing their hopes all his life. He’s thrived on it.
BUT dashing the hopes of the 197 signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement is not going to be quite so satisfactory.